A few weeks ago, I checked my email on a Thursday night at around
9pm. Nothing important in the inbox.

The next morning, when I started work at about 7am, I went into
my email inbox to find that 2 of my subscribers had each ordered
multiple information products from me overnight while I was
sleeping.

The total dollar amount: $1,079.

In addition, my agent sent me an unexpected royalty check for
$1,993 for a Japanese edition of a book I wrote in 1985.

Total passive income for the day (so far): $3,072

Hardly a fortune. Didn’t make me rich. For many internet
marketers, peanuts.

But the point is that “in my sleep” that night I made slightly
more money than the average American makes working three full
40-hour weeks (not including commuting time) to earn.

With no labor on my part. No meetings. No phone calls. No leaving
the house. No even being awake!

I tell you this not to brag, but to make a point:

I firmly believe you should have multiple streams of income, with
at least one of them being passive income.

For two reasons.

First, while a paycheck is steady and expected, orders like the
$3,072 are unexpected — and there is delight in surprise.

Even if it’s a small amount, an unexpected royalty, commission,
bonus, or order makes my day … and many of my colleagues have
told me the same is true for them, too.

Second, and more important, if you can develop a passive income
stream that generates annual six-figure revenues … without
active daily labor from you …

(… in other words, you make money when you sleep — or are on
vacation — or do nothing at all …)

…that gives you a degree of financial security that 95% of your
friends, relatives, and neighbors will never have.

I am not money hungry or even money oriented.

I work long hours in my copywriting business and will do so as
long as I am able. Yes, to make money and also for the sheer
pleasure of it.

But by making a six-figure passive second income online, it’s
comforting to know we could live nicely off that $100,000+
alone if our active income profit centers went belly up (e.g.,
you got fired, your luncheonette went out of business).

Years ago, a freelance copywriter complained to me about the
crisis-lull-crisis nature of freelance as well as ad agency work.

Many other freelancer tell me the same thing.

When they have little or no work, almost no leads come their way,
and most those that do are of poor quality, and the good ones
never close.

On the flip side, when you get busy, the work keeps on coming,
and your schedule fills to nearly overflowing with great clients
and assignments paying top dollar.

Self-employed professionals in many fields also encounter the
crisis-lull-crisis cycle.

I have found 2 very effective ways to fight it.

The first is continual marketing, which means marketing your
services even when you’re busy — in fact especially when you are
busy.

That way you fill up your lead pipeline, so that if a bunch of
clients go silent or the leads don’t close, you have plenty of
other prospects in line eager to take their place.

The second strategy for keeping busy and profitable is to have a
second stream of income (or several), so when your main business
hits a temporarily slump, you have other revenue-generating work
to turn to.

“After 23 years as a full-time freelance copywriter, I still
occasionally find myself in a difficult situation with a client.

“As you know, in their terms and conditions, most copywriters
stipulate that copy revisions are free of charge, but changes to
the assignment will incur an extra charge.

“I do this too, but sometimes there can be a slight grey area in
which a client can argue that a small change to the assignment is
actually just another revision. [This incremental additional work
is referred to as “scope creep.”]

“My client did this today, and I’ve ended up effectively working
3 extra hours for free. For goodwill I offered to ‘meet halfway’,
but the client — a very large company — now refuses to pay
anything above the quoted amount.

“More than ever, clients know how powerful they are and it looks
like I’ve got to grin and bear this loss. Perhaps there’s a
newsletter article here?”

Well, this covers two fundamental rules of the service business,
both of which are important.

The first rule: the time to discuss costs is before they are
incurred, not after the fact.

DC should have given his client a written estimate of the extra
hours the rework would take, and gotten them to agree before
proceeding.

Because he did not, I feel the client owes DC nothing for the
extra rework.

The second rule is: if it’s a choice between being too generous
to your clients vs. being a hard ass and looking out for yourself
first, you should err on the side of being too generous.

I’m not saying you should be a sucker and work for people for
free.

But it’s almost always better, in case of disagreement or
dispute, for the outcome to favor the client, and not you, even
if it costs you in time, money, or both.

Being a large corporation, the client company here could have
given DC a significant amount of new business — many tens of
thousands of dollars — if they continued to use his services.

Therefore, eating 3 hours of DC’s time is insignificant when
compared to the potential income from this account.

And when you treat people in business fairly and favorably, word
gets around, and you build a reputation for being honest and
honorable.

On the other hand, if DC fights the client on this, he will lose
favor with them, and they won’t continue to use him.

The great David Ogilvy likened the advertising business to a game
of chess and advised, “Guard your King and Queen; let the pawns
go.”

In the late 1970s, when I first became a professional writer, the
most sought-after assignment in freelancing was writing magazine
articles.

Today, among AWAI students and other copywriters, the most
sought-after assignment is a long-copy promotion such as a
magalog or video sales letter (VSL) selling a product via direct
response.

Anyway, back in the day, the writers’ magazines … and the
speakers at writing conferences … virtually all gave the same
advice to newbie freelance writers: start big.

They said to avoid the literary journals, the little magazines,
trade journals, and other no-pay/low-pay markets.

Instead, right off the bat, target the top-tier magazines; e.g.
Cosmopolitan, Harper’s, Atlantic Monthly, Omni, and so on.

In freelance copywriting, some — certainly not all copywriting
teachers — say to write for big-name companies paying top fees
and royalties right from the get-go.

This may be great advice, and I may be a chicken about it, but I
largely ignored it and did the opposite.

For articles, I went after smaller outlets, including smaller
papers in the cities where I lived — and magazines in
specialized niches with smaller circulations, such as Chemical
Engineering Magazine, Science Books & Films, Democrat &
Chronicle, Bergen Record, and Writer’s Digest.

When I started freelancing in my spare time right out of college,
my first freelance articles appeared in the Baltimore City Paper
— these were medium-length feature pieces for which I was paid on
average $50 each:

“Kaizen” is the Japanese philosophy of making continuous
improvements.

Given that there is hardly anything we do that we can’t do
better, this is a smart approach to business.

The problem, however, is that our time and attention is already
absorbed by pressing tasks, deadlines, and responsibilities.

So making improvements in our systems, processes, skills, and
products too often falls by the wayside.

My solution is a business tactic I call the “kaizen break.”

Notice that as you are working frantically on getting through
your to-do list, you invariably tire.

And when you do, you take a small mental break … maybe 5 or 10
minutes … before either returning to the major task you were
working on — or moving to the next major task.

During these breaks, we often waste time, or at least are fairly
unproductive, doing everything from watching a quick YouTube
video or getting a coffee refill, to petting the dog or staring
out the window.

So here’s how to turn these short bits of wasted time into
profitable time with my “kaizen break” method.

In a kaizen break, instead of futzing around, you do a short task
— usually one with no urgency — that can produce an incremental
improvement in your business.

Example: A few weeks ago I presented one of my standard webinars,
“Effective Business Writing.”

Over the decades, I have presented versions of this basic program
on how to write better and faster dozens of times — earning
hundreds of thousands of dollars teaching it over and over.

Whenever I give one of my talks, I always think of ways,
immediately after presenting, to make it better.

So, after my most recent lecture, I printed a hard copy of the
PowerPoint.

The next day, during a short break between copywriting projects,
I went over the slides with a pen.

I made a few corrections, added a few points, and then faxed my
small edits to my PowerPoint designer for a minor update of the
file.

The result?

In a brief pause between intensive writing, during which I
otherwise would have sat here contemplating my nave l, I instead
made a small but useful improvement to one of my core products.

Namely, a workshop that I get $5,500 a day to deliver to my
corporate training clients.

For me, turning dead time into productive time like this, and
wasted time into a money-maker, is a no-brainer.

Thanks to my new “kaizen breaks,” I am making small non-urgent
but valuable improvements to my systems and products almost
every week of the year.